Ozymandias
Ozymandias is the title of a famous poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley from the year 1817. The eponymous name Ozymandias (variants: Ozymandias , Osymandyas ; Greek Ὀσυμανδύας Osymandyas ) is that of Diodorus Hellenized version of the throne name "User-maat-Re" ( " Re - User-maat ") of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II.
content
The sonnet is about the story of a wanderer who comes across a crumbling monument of King Ozymandias in a desert . The theme is the transience of earthly works. The poem was written in December 1817 as part of a writing competition and published for the first time in January 1818 . It was set to music by Richard Bales in 1941.
On the subject of the poem, Shelley was inspired by the colossal head of a statue of Ramses II, which was transported to London by Giovanni Battista Belzoni from the Ramesseum in Thebes in 1816 at the instigation of Henry Salt and exhibited there.
Original English text:
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: - Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert ... Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed
And on the pedestal these words appear
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! '
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Translation:
A wanderer came from an old country,
and said: “A huge fragment of stone
stands in the desert, torso-free leg to leg,
the head next to it, half covered by the sand.
Defiance of features teaches us:
The sculptor knew how
to read that vain mockery that
stamped his honorable hand into dead material .
And on the pedestal is the writing: 'My name
is Osymandias, King of all kings: -
See my works, mighty ones, and be trembling!'
Nothing more remained. A picture of gloomy grief,
stretching around the ruins endless, bare, monotonous
The desert itself that buries the colossus. "
- (Translation by Adolf Strodtmann , 1866)
reception
In Three- Legged Monsters on Earth Course , the first volume in the series The Three-Legged Rulers , the man who, disguised as a wanderer, recruits children for the resistance , gives himself the name Ozymandias and uses part of the poem. His choice fell on this name because in some ways he is also a traveler from a lost land, as he also saw many of the ancient cities of humans from before the alien destruction on his travels.
One of the main characters in the Watchmen comic series is a character named Ozymandias , whose real name is Adrian Alexander Veidt. Veidt gives himself the code name Ozymandias after he arrested a group of drug dealers and a police officer asked him who he was. Ozymandias appears as an admirer of the ancient Egyptian culture, whose art he collects.
The album Qntal IV by the band Qntal , released in 2005, is nicknamed Ozymandias; it also includes parts of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem.
The 60th and third from last episode of the TV series Breaking Bad is called Ozymandias . In addition, the piece was used in a teaser for the last eight episodes of the series in August 2013 , in which the protagonist Walter White recited the poem from off to atmospheric landscape panoramas. For the episode of MythBusters produced for the same occasion , a similar teaser was produced, which is cut from scenes by MythBusters and read by Jamie Hyneman .
The name of the protagonist of the computer game Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs , which was published in 2013, is Oswald Mandus. Based on the game content and official information from the developers, it can be deduced that this name is derived from Ozymandias.
The poem is quoted in Alien: Covenant (2017) by Android David, who thinks he is some kind of god. He wrongly names Byron as the author, but is corrected by Walter, the other, "good" android, that it is from Shelley, an advocate of atheism.
In the third volume of the Fantasy - Trilogy Queen of Shadows - Banished ( The Fate of the Tearling - The Tearling Trilogy, Book 3) by Erika Johansen is also referred to in sections three to the poem reference, as the main character Kelsea Glynn about the importance of their Thinks about actions. So the chapter ends by quoting the line from the poem, "See my works, Mighty ones, and shake".
In the film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs it is one of the poems that the "armless and legless" recites in mobile theater.
In the short story Lohnschreiber in Woody Allen's book Pure Anarchy , film producer E. Coli Biggs uses the name Ozymandias Pemp as a disguise.
In Tom Clancy's book Hunt for Red October , Jack Ryan quotes the passage with the base inscription as he gives the rocket keys to his superiors. He illustrates the destructive power of nuclear weapons, but also has to admit that he is tired and drunk when he quotes Shelly.
literature
- Donald H. Reiman, Sharon B. Powers. Shelley's Poetry and Prose. Norton, 1977, ISBN 0-393-09164-3 .
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, Theo Gayer-Anderson (Illust.): Ozymandias. Hoopoe Books, 1999, ISBN 977-5325-82-X
- John Rodenbeck: Travelers from an Antique Land: Shelley's Inspiration for 'Ozymandias. In: Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics. No. 24 (“Archeology of Literature: Tracing the Old in the New”, 2004), pp. 121-148.
Web links
- Representative Poetry Online: Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), "Ozymandias" (text with annotations)
- World Treasures (National Library of Australia) - (Autograph of the text from one of Shelley's notebooks with small differences from modern versions)
- Horace Smith's poem of the same name
Individual evidence
- ^ I met a traveler from an antique land lieder.net.
- ↑ Joyce Tyldesley: Myth of Egypt. Reclam, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 978-3-15-010598-6 . P. 104 f.
- ↑ Text in the English Wikisource.
- ^ Text of the translation on Wikisource.
- ↑ John Christopher, Three Legged Monsters on Earth Course, Chapter 2, My Name is Ozymandias.
- ↑ grantland.com
- ↑ dsc.discovery.com
- ↑ Johansen, Erika: The Queen of Shadows - Banished . tape 3 . Heyne publishing house. Kindle version, p. 154 .